About

Photo by Simone Cavadini

NEVERCREW is a swiss based artists duo composed by Christian Rebecchi & Pablo Togni. They work together since 1996.

In the recent years NEVERCREW undertook a research that doesn’t aim at forcedly channeling reflections in a precise stylistic and formal way, but rather to find a new language that allows to follow them, deepen them and share them; and especially that it’s also a practical and visible demonstration of that. Working together since almost twenty years, Christian Rebecchi & Pablo Togni developed the issue of the comparison (the confrontation between two persons, between ideas, between forces) and at the same time, interacting in the public space as street artists, they extended this confrontation outside in a direct way, making this perennial dual "discussion" one of the hubs of their work.

NEVERCREW works then on particular “living systems”, overviews that are made perceptible in their totality and in their structure by the act of sectioning, which allows to see them (and if desired, to explore them) as they are inside while maintaining the perceptible global shape. They apply and generate a double vision, or "simultaneous vision", layered in sets/systems that start from the individual mechanical or natural components up to the overall composition given by the association of different subjects, and then finally expand out automatically in a direct and personal relationship with the observer and the environment.

The issues that they want to examine are closely connected to the base of their work: it’s especially a view on the human condition, on the relationship between mankind and nature, between mankind and its nature, and on economic or social systems. They work on all of this developing a way to incorporate everything into a broader and more global topic that could gradually shows itself as a whole and be readable in every component in a vision of total and inevitable relationship between everything, between all parts, where only the point of view, the location within a system, defines a selection.

To do so they create mechanisms, intended both for their purely mechanical or more figurative sense: working structures made of elements connected one to each other and articulated, structures that recall artificial machinery made by man (with or without a use) as well as the physical essence of nature, social relationships and interactions in general.

Even in the method of creation of these mechanisms the dominant element is the relationship between the parties, that they use as the same means for the realization. There’s for NEVERCREW an approach based on selection and composition, on the defining of links between existing elements and parts designed specifically as needed. They choose to mix components from different fields, sometimes almost anonymous and sometimes perfectly recognizable to create more immediate connections.

In this process becomes important also the time component, considering that all the mechanical objects that they prepare gradually accumulate and become part of an archive, a sort of box of mechanics colors where to choose from, becoming a means to create other structures in a constant evolutions. Similar to an alphabet that acquires new letters as new words and new thoughts require it, thus increasingly making new sentences and a new communication possible.

In the most recent works are then pieces belonged to older works, as memories. A memory that becomes personal and global structural basis, the gradual experience that stratifies, between causes and effects.

In NEVERCREW's work the mechanisms are the trigger, the generator from which the rest develops. They consider them the primary key to understand and allow them to give a proportion to things. Obviously, as mentioned, they see as "mechanism" in a broader sense also the whole system which they represent: the group of elements in an artwork which in turn is compared with what surrounds them physically, conceptually. The relationship between the parties is extended to the whole of reality, the place and the viewer, that they seek to involve on different levels: logical, instinctive, emotional and associative. This then completes the structure with its own vision, with its history and its multiple interpretations and connections, and he is given a way to look at a system, of which it is part, from the outside.

“When you look at NEVERCREW, the two members seem to be artistically united yet attentive to their differences, proclaiming their own contradictions. Humanists, yet still aware of the human race’s definitive position in an environment that overtakes and overwhelms it. Realists, yet with a paradoxical, evanescent sense of realism, always open to the possibilities created by the gnawing forces of our imagination. (…)”

“(…) A fracture, a world on its own, a personal language that arises in total contrast with the real, with what we used to know, by throwing us in a visual system stimulated only by the imagination. The work of Christian Rebecchi & Pablo Togni aka NEVERCREW lives of four hands, two entities, two thoughts and unique approaches that when mixed between them generate a precise and multifaceted mark. In this case the work of the duo moves through a constant balance between fantasy and mechanics, a similarity that produces a reverb effect that creates an unique empathy in the viewer, an escape from reality produced by the reality itself as a real solution and answer to the daily.(…)”